by techradar (https://www.techradar.com/best/best-linux-desktop)--an article that slipped under my radar.

Not much Solus though in article. Budgie is bigger than that now. Was surprised at Deepin and LXQT in the top 5.
Not to undermine myself anymore but this site is full of linux lists...
..the reason I'm posting this is..
1) Budgie deserves the love and
2) this list made me remember a comment I never forgot. when Solus disappeared I tried Budgie on a few distros. It was at a fedora forum (or was it endeavour?) a guy or girl said:
"Budgie is great but the Budgie experience on Solus is stlll the best experience."
And this was a Fedora user..After kicking the tires on many I have to agree.
#celticmagic

    brent Budgie deserves the love and

    The best Linux desktop is the one that best fits a user's needs and preferences. For a lot of folks - especially new users - that's indeed Budgie. When I discovered Solus after years of distro hopping, I chose to download and install Budgie as well. Something about the word, "Flagship," I guess.

    I was quite happy with Budgie for a couple years, but eventually I started to feel trapped by the limit of just 8 workspaces, because I regularly used more applications than that, and liked to keep them available without needing to search for them in a system menu. And since I use most of those applications at full-screen, I much prefer not to pile unrelated applications on top of one another in a single workspace.

    When I realized that there was no such limitation with Plasma - a DE I had used with SuSE long before - I gave it a shot. Put simply, I enjoy using it so much that I don't miss Budgie at all. All but one of my computers here has run on Plasma for years - even the tiny ACER TravelMate laptop I bought for motorcycle touring.

    I had wondered whether it would run such a sophisticated DE, with its Celeron processor and very limited resources, but it has no problem at all doing that. It's not as fast as our i7 Latitudes, of course, but I haven't found anything it can't do.

    I sometimes wonder if Budgie had alllowed me to use enough workspaces to handle my preferred workflow, if I would still be using it today. Since I've installed and used VMs of all the Solus DEs, I'm guessing probaby not.

    Please don't take my experience to mean that I have anything against Budgie, or the folks who prefer it. As I said, if it fits your needs and makes you happy, it's the perfect DE for you. Certainly the best DE of 2024.

        WetGeek The best Linux desktop is the one that best fits a user's needs and preferences.

        By the way, I did read the Tech Radar article - every word - and enjoyed it thoroughly. I recommend it as a guide for anyone who's still searching for a DE that meets their needs and preferences. It's well written, well edited, and unlike the impression that the title gives, the article does not insist that any one DE is the "best" for every user.

        I am a bit surprised that it has one glaring omission, though.

            I have to admit I'm planning to try out budgie again. I'm getting a little sick of the Gnome drama.

              WetGeek By the way, I did read the Tech Radar article - every word - and enjoyed it thoroughly. I recommend it as a guide for anyone who's still searching for a DE that meets their needs and preferences. It's well written, well edited, and unlike the impression that the title gives, the article does not insist that any one DE is the "best" for every user.

              eh. I thought it was all lightweight fluff (lxqt and enlightenment over most DEs? really?) but it was nice to see Josh's baby get some love.

                Sebastian Then Cosmic DE might be something for you.

                While I do like Budgie a lot, KDE Plasma just fits my needs best. Both my EndeavourOS install and my Solus install are running that. I must admit, I'm eager to try Cosmic once it's released and relatively stable.

                    UncleSpellbinder Yeah, every now and then I log into Cosmic on my Fedora machine. And while it is far from ready, it is already impressive.
                    I tried to build it on Solus, but I unfortunately do not have enough RAM for that.

                      riffer I try not to listen to the GNOME drama. I prefer its overall design and workflow more than a traditional desktop. I'm one of those weirdos that actually likes vanilla GNOME without extensions.

                        I keep jumping back and forth between Solus Budgie and Archlinux, as stated from others, Solus is the best implementation of the budgie desktop, I have been using Solus budgie since their initial public release back in 2015. for Archlinux I really do like the cinnamon desktop, and think that it is a very much an under rated desktop, I also enjoy throwing windows managers on Solus, AwesomeWM, SpectreWM ect.. and most recently the Nimdow window manager, only because I have been playing around with the Nim programming language of late, and to see if its actually possible as some of the window managers and dependencies are not in the Solus repo and needs to manually built and installed

                          DrunkenAlcoholic when I gave bwspm a spin, Solus had all the packages from taskbar to compositor in the repo and their dependencies. Are you doing something advanced?

                          PS--when people get bit by the WM bug (I have no idea what the diff is between TM and DM) they really get bit. I thought I had the bug too but I realized it was a lot of work and I'd be better off taking a feature-rich DE and minimizing its heft. I'm better at subtracting than adding🙂. Stay bit!

                              brent between TM and DM

                              TM = Transcendental Meditation
                              DM = Direct Messaging

                              🤣